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The History of QROS

 

QROS, Limited was founded in 2004 by Colin Green of Guilford Surrey England.  As a research chemist, he has been active in contaminated land analysis since 1991. With extensive research experience within the nuclear physics, oncology and analytical chemistry arenas, he recognized the benefits of useful analytical screening tools.  With this range of experience he began to integrate numerous technologies into the UK and European environmental markets such as immunoassays, PID instruments, ASV instrumentation for low level heavy metal analysis as well as petroleum hydrocarbon field tests.  QROS was established in response to a need within the contaminated land and water industry for a single resource for screening techniques that could generate rapid and reliable results.  Research and development includes the expansion of existing technology into the environmental sector.  Examples:

" QED, for Ultraviolet Fluorescence utilizes the optics from the Mars Rover program of NASA.

" Immunoassays from the Medical Diagnostics Industry

In 2007 QROS was awarded a contract to perform all the screening analysis of contaminated soil on the Olympic Park enabling project (London Olympics 2012). QROSs involvement was instrumental in assuring the project move three months ahead of schedule. Due to the success of QROS in the UK, 2008 saw the launch QROS US.  These operations are managed by Felecia Owen, located in Wilmington, NC to serve the expansion of QROS technology applications throughout the United States.  These operations have been involved in a number of DOD projects, UST applications, Manufacturing remediation projects, and other assessment and remediation activities.  QROS continues to expand to Australia, Nigeria and other countries seeking cost effective reliable environmental data.  In 2010, the QROS QED was awarded the remediation technology innovation of the year for the United Kingdom, an esteemed accomplishment.

Knowledge and Experience

First Observation:  

With Good quality analysis from a reputable laboratory requires a team of staff that includes the technician who operates the instrument, an analyst to interpret the data and another technician who can maintain the analyzer. The same requirements are needed when running an analyzer on site, but the role of the technicians and analyst must be combined into one person. This level of expertise is unusual in one person and if a person is not sufficiently well trained in the use of a technique, the results produced can be misleading. To effectively use on-site analysis, techniques must be available to analyze for all of the contaminants expected on the site. This means the on-site analyst must be familiar with a wide variety of techniques and instruments, and have ready access to them all. For most on-site practitioners, finding anyone with this level of expertise was almost impossible as was the task of finding all of the techniques needed. One final issue was the requirement for a readily available back up for the analyzer if the one on site stopped working for some reason (normally a breakage).   For these reasons on-site analysis remained a fringe activity. QROS removes these problems by providing a highly trained analyst plus all of the required analyzers for a particular project.

Second Observation:  

The majority of analytical devices and techniques that are being used are adaptations of existing instruments or techniques often over 20 years old.  These are not specifically designed for on-site analysis for contaminated land. For this reason QROS has heavily invested in its own development program to design and build instruments and develop techniques specifically for on-site use. The first of these products is the QED hydrocarbon analyzer.  This unique analyzer is able to identify the sample hydrocarbon type and quantify the amount of hydrocarbon present.   QROS also works closely with other technology manufacturers to help them produce products more readily tailored to contaminated land analysis. For example, QROS has assisted in the development process of Oxford Instruments, a world leading UK company in the design and manufacture of X Ray Fluorescence analyzers. The QROS development team is strategically focused on the development of new field techniques and analyzers.